Arkady caught his breath at a fluid and briefly glimpsed dun-and-gray form passing under the scattered trees along the canal bank. “Is that a horse?”
“Wild donkey,” Osnat answered. She was staring down at the Line too, her eyes gone so pale in the weak winter sunlight that from where Arkady sat they seemed to be transparent. “Horses are extinct now. Even on the Line.”
“Wild,” Arkady said, picking up on the earlier word. “You mean naturally reproducing.”
“Yeah.” Her voice sank to near background noise as she craned her neck out the far window to keep the donkey in her line of vision.
“Those early genetic weapons were pretty unpredictable. Mostly they boiled down to dumping massive loads of pesticides and synthetic estrogens and heavy metals and hoping that the combined toxin load would do the job. The Temple Mount bomb scrambled horse, human, and songbird DNA beyond repair. Donkeys, on the other hand, are still breeding like rabbits. Actually, rabbits are still breeding like rabbits, come to think of it. And I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how well the ants are doing.” She sighed—a sigh that was all out of proportion with the not-very-serious problem of too many ants. “On the other hand, the bombing did scare us into three centuries of peace. I guess that counts for something.”
“What started up the war again, Osnat?”
“Hell if I know. It was like everyone just woke up one morning and decided to flush it all down the toilet.”
She frowned down at the treetops while the silence (a relative notion in the ear-shattering roar of the helicopter) stretched to uncomfortable lengths.
“You must remember the open border,” Arkady ventured finally.
“I grew up with it. I was already in college when the war started.”
Arkady had read about the open border, a fact of life in Israel and Palestine during the centuries of shocked peace that followed the Left-Behind Bombing. The whole concept of the border—of any border—had seemed impossibly theoretical until now, as incomprehensible to Syndicate eyes as everything else about the human notions of countries and national loyalties. Now, watching the shadow of their chopper flicker over the hills and valleys, Arkady could finally match words to reality.
There were fences down there. And the only fences Arkady had ever seen in his life were the ones crèchelings put up at the back of playing fields during field trips to Gilead to stop stray balls from rolling away. They really meant it, he realized, looking at those fences. The idea of “owning” a piece of a planet might seem as quaint as witchcraft to him, but these people were willing to kill each other over it.
“Did you know any Palestinians before the war?” Arkady asked Osnat.
“My first boyfriend was Palestinian. My parents loved him. Thought he was a good influence on me.” She smirked. “I was not a well-behaved adolescent.”
Arkady blinked, taken aback by the sheer number of unthinkables in that reply. “And what’s he doing now?”
Her smile shut down like an airlock slamming closed. “He’s dead. All those nice boys I grew up with are dead. On both sides.” She gave a bitter laugh. “And for what? So we can listen to the bastards in the Knesset make patriotic speeches.”
She lit a cigarette and smoked it, hunched over the little flame like a dog trying to keep someone from stealing its bone.
“This used to be the most beautiful country,” she said finally. Arkady would hear those words, or some version of them, so many times over the coming weeks, and from so many people on both sides of the Line, that they would come to seem like an epitaph for the Jerusalem Osnat’s generation had grown up in. “I wish you could see what it was like before the war. They were even talking about opening up the cleaner parts of the Line and turning them into an international peace park.” She turned away and stubbed out her half-smoked cigarette as if she’d lost the stomach for it. “Ah, fuck, I don’t know why I’m even telling you.”
Arkady made a helpful face but Osnat was staring out the window, seeing only the past and its long-buried dead.
“Oh well.” She sounded almost friendly for a moment. “Not your problem. Just dodge the mortars for a few weeks and you’re out of here.”
“And you?”
“And me what?”
“Why don’t you leave?”
She jabbed a nicotine-stained finger toward him abruptly enough to make him flinch. “Bingo. Just the question I ask the bitch in the mirror every morning.”
“And?”
“And you’ll be the first to know if I ever get a straight answer out of her.”
Arkady must have fallen asleep after that. When he woke the city was gone and they were flying over empty desert.
Waves of sand ran away to the horizon under towering dust-brown thunderheads that the pilot seemed to be flying into at every moment. The sun shone feebly through the enveloping haze, though Osnat’s sunburned face testified to its destroying power.
Arkady shifted uncomfortably. He’d hoped that flying would relieve the constant ache of full gravity. But, flying or earthbound, he was still sucked onto this spinning rock like a bug in a wind tunnel, every joint popping and aching until it was hard to believe his ancestors had survived long enough to make it off the planet.
Night was falling, and suddenly he identified something that had been pricking at the edge of his mind for several minutes.
“There are lights down there!”
“What?” Osnat had dozed off too, judging by the soft, bleary-eyed face she turned toward him. “Sure. No big deal. Someone’s got a generator.”
“But…aren’t we still over the Line?”
She glanced at her bulky wristwatch. “Yep.”
“People live down there?”
She cocked her head, turning her good eye on him. “What, you thought all that prime real estate was empty just because of a piddly few birth defects?”
“Who are they?”
“They’re called Ghareebeh. Arabic for stranger.”
“So they’re Arabs?”
“Some of them. Some of them are the children of Jewish settlers who refused to leave. Some of them are just poor schmucks born in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“But how do they live?”
“Let’s just say they don’t drink the water if they can afford not to. Like I told you, those were the wild frontier days of genetic weaponry.” Her voice took on a more sarcastic edge than usual. “Now we’re more environmentally responsible.”
“Osnat?”
“What?”
“Can you answer a question?”
“Ask it and I’ll let you know.”
“Who’s Absalom?”
“It’s a code name.” She sounded as flatly objective as if she were summarizing the results of a peer-reviewed scientific study. “Most people on this side of the Line think the man behind the code name was Gavi Shehadeh.”
“A Palestinian.”
She wrapped her arms across her chest and huddled into the corner of her seat. “Half-Palestinian. His mother was Jewish. I don’t know the whole story. Just that he was some kind of war hero back in the days when the soldiers on the Line were real soldiers, not Enderbots. And then he went into AI work. Or maybe he was already doing it before the war started, I don’t know. Anyway, he was working on EMET when the Mossad tapped him for counterintelligence work. Just compsec at first, but he didn’t stay stuck there for long. Didi Halevy moved him into counterintelligence. And then…he climbed. And not just by riding Didi’s coattails. No one ever accused Gavi of not being good at his job.”
“And what did he do to make Moshe hate him so much?”
“He turned traitor.”
“So he’s in…prison?”
“No.” She looked like she wanted to spit. “Maybe he had a horse—that’s what we call it when someone has a friend in high places to protect him. Or maybe it was just too embarrassing for the people who promoted him and trusted him. All I know is he’s still alive.”
Arkady dige
sted the staggering implications of that statement. “You mean you still execute people?”
“Of course not. We’re not the Americans, for God’s sake. But you can always arrange a nice clean traffic accident.”
They set down on a gritty landing strip hacked out of the same straggling scrub oak and juniper that Arkady could have found on almost any of the terraformed planets he’d worked on in the last decade. The pilot flew in low and fast and lifted off again before they’d even cleared the rotor wash.
Osnat hustled Arkady across the tarmac to a small half-track whose paint had been scoured so clean by wind and sand that Arkady couldn’t read its markings.
“I’ll have to ask you to get in the back,” she said. “Sorry.”
The back of the half-track was unlit and smelled strongly of biodiesel and some unclean animal that he gradually identified as human. He climbed in and found a blanket to sit on.
“Just keep your mask on,” Osnat told him, “and remember this is for your own safety too. There are a lot of people around here who’d kill you on sight if they knew what you were. And they don’t all work for the UN.” Then she rolled the steel door down with a clatter, leaving Arkady in darkness.
The truck stopped so many times that Arkady lost count. The first few stops were at traffic intersections, he thought. Another two were at checkpoints. But though he heard the border police checking the truck over, they never opened up the back or asked him for his papers.
Other stops had no obvious purpose. The truck would simply pull over to the side of the road, gravel crackling under the wheels, and wait. Sometimes Osnat and the drivers got out, sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes they waited for a minute, and sometimes they waited for what felt like hours. Once, very late into the night, he heard Osnat’s voice:
“Look at that! Back a day and I already have a mosquito bite. How can you get a mosquito bite in the middle of a fucking desert in the middle of a fucking ice age?”
One of the men said something in Hebrew too riddled with slang for Arkady to make sense of.
“Not unless you pay better than the army does,” Osnat said succinctly, and everybody laughed again.
Eventually Arkady dropped off to sleep, only jolting awake when the engine shuddered to a halt again. He heard voices, footsteps. Then the steel door rattled up to reveal Osnat flanked by two powerfully built young men, both gripping snub-nosed carbines in their broad farmer’s hands.
“Out,” Osnat said.
They hurried him across a dark parking lot toward a low shed that was the only building Arkady could see anywhere this side of the undulating desert horizon. Despite the visible weapons, Arkady had the feeling that discipline had relaxed here. What was the point of theatrics, after all, when he didn’t stand a chance of crossing the waterless waste that surrounded them?
The shed turned out to be the top end of a flight of stairs that plunged down three stories without a single door opening off it in any direction. The stairs bottomed out in front of a steel fire door. The fire door opened on a cramped room with nothing in it but a ratty couch and a dilapidated workstation. Sitting on the couch, sipping Turkish coffee with his sandaled feet up on a crate of RPG rounds, sat Moshe.
He raised his glass to Arkady. “Good news. The first round of the auction kicks off the day after tomorrow at the King David Hotel.”
“Auction?” Arkady asked, confused. “What auction?”
“Oh right. You slept through all that. Turns out—excuse me.” Moshe rummaged in his pockets, pulled out a frayed and crumpled handkerchief, and blew his nose with loud abandon. “Turns out Israel’s not interested in your genetic weapon after all. My betters have decided to put you back on the market and see if they can make back the money we blew getting you here.”
“But I defected to Israel. I never agreed to—”
“You’re right. It’s not very nice of us.” Moshe had been wearing his usual shorts and T-shirt when they’d arrived, but now the guards were rattling up and down the stairs bringing in supplies from the half-track, and a cold wind whistled down the stairwell. Moshe fished a sweater out from between the frayed cushions of the couch and pulled it over his head so that his next words were muffled. “You want to call the whole thing off and go home?”
“I can’t go home.” Arkady let all the fear and uncertainty and isolation of the past weeks well up in his voice. “It’s too late for that. They’ll kill me.”
Moshe straightened his glasses and hunched forward to stare at Arkady. “I wish I knew whether it was your skin or your career prospects you were really worried about. The thing is, Arkady, we might be willing to help…but you haven’t given us any reason to take much of a chance on you.”
“But Arkasha’s work—”
“Wake up and smell the coffee. Your so-called genetic weapon is for the public in front of the curtain. If someone’s willing to pay for it, we’re happy to take their money. But if you want us to commit to you, you’re going to have to bring something better than cloned bugs to show-and-tell.”
“Like what?”
Moshe gave him a level stare. “Like Absalom.”
“And if I give you Absalom?”
“Political asylum. Guaranteed. For you and Arkasha. In Israel, not some corporate black hole where they’ll pull your fingernails out just to make extra sure you’re telling them everything.”
“I don’t know if—”
“It’s a take-it-or-leave-it deal, Arkady. And it’s all I got. So do yourself a favor and take the time to think about it.”
“How long do I have?”
“Until the auction. Oh, and did I mention Korchow was going to be there? What’s the matter, Arkady? You look a little nervous. Not so eager to see your old friends again?”
NOVALIS
Ground Truth
While the human species, as a mechanical going concern, has become organized into a social whole, the motivation that keeps it going has not undergone the same thoroughgoing reorganization, but continues to be in a great measure individualistic in type. Social ends are achieved through appeal to individual selfish instincts. Our present industrial system operates by way of a mutually selfish bargain, in which each party to the transaction seeks his own advantage, regardless of the gain or loss to the species as a whole. The system works tolerably well… at least so it seems to those accustomed to the system.
But…the future evolution of our race may proceed in a direction that shall ultimately ease the conflict between man and man, and between man and the world at large.
—ALFRED J. LOTKA (1924)
The first sign of trouble on Novalis was the detailed volatiles inventory. Theoretically, the nonsensical DVI numbers were a purely scientific issue. In practice, however, the DVI crisis turned out to be less about science than about culture and social skills. And the ensuing flurry of questions, arguments, and recriminations made Arkady begin to worry that the Novalis survey might turn into the kind of spectacular disaster that provided fodder for mission-planning manuals.
The DVI was Aurelia’s baby—Aurelia the rock doctor, not Aurelia the people doctor. Both Aurelias had become Arkady’s fast friends before he’d even scrubbed away the last remnants of freezerburn. He’d worked with other Aurelias before, and the Aurelias on the Novalis mission had their geneline’s typical character and attitudes. They worked hard, even by Syndicate standards. They gave short shrift to fools and hypocrites. They expected perfection from themselves and others. They were tactless, abrasive, aggressive, impatient, and generally impossible if you got in their way. They were also loyal, affectionate, and profoundly kind if you were lucky enough to have earned their friendship.
As often happened on new assignments, Arkady and the current pair of Aurelias benefited from past goodwill. Arkady had been close friends with other Aurelias and was hoping to be equally close to the new A-12 workpair. The Aurelias had fond memories of past Arkadys and were primed to make friends with their new A-11 colleagues. Arkady slipped into th
e ready-made friendship as comfortably as a duck hopping into a familiar pond…which was a good thing considering the distinctly uncomfortable nature of what should have been a much closer friendship: the one with Arkasha.
Not that he had a lot of time to think about that. Everyone was racing so frantically to get the prelanding work done before the ship fell into orbit around Novalis that they barely had time to sleep and eat, let alone worry about their social lives.
The DVI was central. The count on free volatiles would tell them whether the planet was geophysically capable of supporting plant and animal life. It was the DVI more than any other single set of numbers that the Aziz A’s would be looking at when they decided whether or not to greenlight the mission and transfer the team to the landing module. And when the DVI went south, so did all hopes of making planetfall on schedule.
The crux of the problem was Bella—and, in a more general way, the very presence of Aziz and Motai constructs on what was supposed to be a purely scientific mission.
The Novalis mission was a one-shot sprint-style expedition: fast and cheap, but by definition shorthanded. Each team member had to be capable of assisting with, or if necessary taking over, mission-critical tasks outside their normal areas of specialty. Indeed, one of the main arguments for including the Aziz A’s and the Motai B’s instead of four more scientists was that they had the generalized practical expertise to take up the slack for the life-sciences teams.
Things hadn’t quite worked out that way.
The two Aziz A’s, with all the goodwill in the world, lacked the training and technical skills even to serve as lab assistants. And the Bellas…well, the Bellas were turning out to be complicated.
As Arkady had predicted, they were quite easy to tell apart despite their uncanny physical resemblance. By the second day out of cold sleep, Arkady had privately dubbed them “Shy Bella” and “Bossy Bella.” Shy Bella barely spoke unless spoken to, and when she did screw up the courage to get a few words out you had to strain to hear them. Arkasha and Laid-back Ahmed both claimed she had a wicked sense of humor, but they were the only two crewmembers besides her pairmate that she was comfortable enough to joke with. And frankly Arkady wasn’t sure how comfortable she was with her pairmate.
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